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Beating Them To the Prewar

Daniel Webster's ideas haven't held this much sway in the White House for a century and a half.

But last week, when the White House was defending President Bush's new strategy of ''pre-emption,'' the great orator's thinking about self-defense -- or at least a carefully selected slice of it -- was suddenly being thrown around the White House press room.

''Anticipatory self-defense is not a new concept,'' Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, told reporters the other day as she was explaining why pre-emption was replacing containment and deterrence as the foundation of American defense policy and serving as the justification for striking Iraq before Iraq strikes. ''You know, Daniel Webster actually wrote a very famous defense of anticipatory self-defense,'' she said.

He did, but under circumstances Ms. Rice, a former Stanford University provost, might not want to delve into too deeply. President Bush, of course, employs the term to gin up support for a strike against Iraq before it could put weapons of mass destruction to use. Secretary of State Webster, in contrast, was attempting to calm down Americans demanding another war with Britain -- while chastising the British for not exhausting diplomatic alternatives before burning a civilian American steamboat on the Niagara River.

It was only the latest example of how history, definitions and defense doctrines are being twisted to fit the Iraq debate. In its rush to convince Congress and the United Nations of the need to act quickly, the Bush administration has bandied about some very different concepts -- pre-emption, preventive war and Ms. Rice's ''anticipatory self-defense'' (a phrase Webster never used) -- as if they were the same thing. Experts in the field say they are not.

''There's a standard distinction here, and a very important one,'' said Michael Walzer, whose 1977 work ''Just and Unjust Wars'' has remained a staple of undergraduate courses on international conflicts. ''Condoleezza Rice says we don't have to wait to be attacked; that's true,'' said Professor Walzer, now at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. ''But you do have to wait until you are about to be attacked.''

As the debate has matured in recent days, Vice President Dick Cheney has crumpled the concepts together with the ringing phrase that the cost of inaction may be greater than the cost of action. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell has insisted there is nothing new here: American history, he suggests, is full of both pre-emptive and preventive military action. But his critics and purists about language offer another explanation: the fuzziness is deliberate. After all, it is hard to argue that Iraq is going to strike us in hours or days when Saddam Hussein has possessed chemical and biological weapons for years, and the British said this week that he is two to five years from having a nuclear device. Thus, attacking Iraq doesn't quite fit under the classic definition of pre-emptive self-defense.

Yet taking out his weapons, to say nothing of knocking off Mr. Hussein himself to make sure they are not rebuilt, more closely resembles preventive war. And that is a problem for the administration, because history and international law have frowned upon preventive war. It has often been used as an excuse for naked aggression.

Daniel Webster gave his own definition of a justifiable pre-emptive action. In 1837 a group of insurgents from Canada who wanted to overthrow British rule teamed up with some Americans eager to repeat the American Revolution on Canadian soil. In what can only be described as a half-baked scheme, they fired some cannonballs across the Niagara River, supplied by a steamboat called the Caroline. The Royal Navy burned it -- an act of pre-emption -- when it was docked on the American side of the river. One man died, but dramatic tales of far greater casualties (including victims swept over Niagara Falls) appeared in American newspapers.

It was five years and a new presidential administration before Webster and his British counterpart tamped it all down, settling the northern border of Maine along the way. In the series of diplomatic exchanges, Webster wrote that striking first against an enemy was acceptable only when the necessity of that self-defense is instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation.''

That is the definition Ms. Rice was alluding to, and the White House insists that the Webster definition applies to this day. But is the Iraqi threat instant? Is it overwhelming? And one question being asked at the United Nations this week: Is there really no moment for deliberation?

A legal adviser in the White House insists Webster's elements are present in the Iraq confrontation. The threat is overwhelming, because his weapons could be used against American allies, including Israel, or slipped to a terrorist for delivery here.

''The only area where we take a slightly more expansive view is in the definition of 'instant,' '' the official said. ''It's a growing threat, and by the time it becomes an instant threat it's too late.''

To other scholars, though, Iraq looks less like a pre-emptive strike and more like a preventive war. And there the classic example is one the White House is unlikely to cite with approval: Dec. 7, 1941. Every schoolchild in Japan is taught that the United States-led embargo on Japan was slowly killing the country's economy and undermining its ability to defend itself. That's why Japan has kept a museum celebrating the heroes of Pearl Harbor.

The logic goes something like this, says Graham Allison of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. ''I may some day have a war with you, and right now I'm strong, and you're not. So I'm going to have the war now. That, of course, was Japan's thinking, and in candid moments some Japanese scholars say -- off the record -- that the country's big mistake was waiting too long.'' But Mr. Allison notes that historically, preventive war has been regarded as illegitimate, because if countries act simply because rivals are getting relatively stronger, you end up having a lot of wars.

The other logic for preventive war, he notes, is reducing casualties. ''The Israelis figured that in 1967, if they went first, they could blunt the consequences,'' he said. That mirrors Mr. Cheney's logic.

Distinctions between preventive and pre-emption are not likely to slow down President Bush as he heads toward a confrontation with Baghdad. Time and again, he and his aides have argued that the old definitions of war don't apply. Terrorists don't send off the kind of classic warning signals -- massing troops on the border, for example -- that made it so much easier to detect an imminent attack in the past.

What the White House seems to desire is a a new category, something halfway between pre-emptive action and preventive war. With one caveat: In Iraq's case they want to blend in a touch of regime change -- Washington's polite phrase for overthrowing a government -- so that they only have to do this once. As Professor Walzer notes, ''That's what makes this neither pre-emptive nor preventive.''